The ever-shifting winds of food trends make feeding children more complicated than ever. Parents' fears, nested in the poor state of Western food culture, have eroded competence at one of parents' most basic tasks: nourishing children into healthy, happy adulthood.

As a parent, I get tested every day on how well I implement my strategy of moderate control over my kids' eating habits, and I’m happy to report that for ten years it has worked well for us. And then my daughter entered middle school.

While we don’t have as much influence as we might wish over our child’s body type and shape, we do have enormous power as parents in one related area: how our children feel about eating, weight, exercise, and so forth.

It is so tempting to view our children as extensions or reflections of ourselves. But when, exactly, does it become not merely desirable but essential to accept how definitively our children are Not Us?

Too often, it takes having or knowing a child with an eating disorder to make parents understand how harmful many prevailing practices around food can be. One example of many is the current way we discuss and practice restrictive eating, once quaintly known as “dieting" but now rebranded as a healthy behavior.

One huge mistake parents make these days is trying to control their child’s health and body by imposing rules on what they can and can’t eat. These rules, however well-intentioned, send children absolutely the wrong messages.

It’s far more pleasurable and sustainable to cook from a sense of tradition and for friends and family, feelings which are happily heightened at holiday meals, than from feelings of guilt or inadequacy.

At long last, attention is shifting to how we eat, with a new focus on the larger forces determining our consumption patterns, on what foods are available to most Americans, and on what kinds of food experiences we have—for example, meals eaten out versus meals cooked at home.

For the first time in memory, a major media outlet is admitting that too many of what are presented as “scientifically proven facts” on weight loss—and concurrently, the effect of exercise, diets, and so forth—are actually unsubstantiated by any scientific standard.

I often feel I’m swimming upstream when it comes to thinking about food, weight and health. That's why I was thrilled recently to discover a heartfelt, irreverent rant by filmmaker Michael Moore that vividly describes so many of the beliefs I hold.

Some twenty states require BMI or similar screening, and nine recommend either BMI screening or a formal fitness assessment that includes a body composition component. This decision may appear as innocuous as the principle of “healthy eating,” but it can be equally damaging.

The Dessert Problem is magnified with the arrival of children, many parents find. The precarious balance they may have discovered with dessert for themselves is turned topsy-turvy by the arrival of small people whose desire for sweets is, in the biblical sense, awesome.

As the memory of that storm week recedes into the past—though not the devastation it wrought, which will be felt for months if not years to come—I find myself wanting to commemorate a surprising common thread that bound together the experience of many people around me: preparing and sharing food.

Mothers, charged with teaching self-esteem to their children, are so unhappy with the way they look, the way they fail to meet some kind of impossible standard of appearance, that they are literally erasing themselves from the visual record.

At a younger and younger age, American children, especially but not exclusively girls, are being taught to worry about food. With the best of intentions, parents are raising children who think of food in loaded terms—something to make us fat/healthy/skinny/smart—instead of as the combination of sustenance and pleasure that it is and is meant to be.

If I were writing this for a glossy magazine, this would be a perfect title: what anxious parent wouldn’t want to read this? But it wouldn’t take long for reality to interfere with your optimism and resolve.

How many times in your adult life have you breathed a sigh of relief that your middle or high school days are well behind you? I’m learning not to celebrate prematurely, because having school age children throws you right back into the mix, engendering feelings sometimes even more painful than the wretched school-era ones you thought you’d exorcised forever.

When Michael Bloomberg announces a proposed ban on super-sized soft drinks, he’s accused once again of trying to implement a nanny state. Yet can’t anyone see that simply relying on people’s willpower isn’t getting us anywhere?

About A Million Meals

As the mother of two children—only two!—I feel like a million meals stand between now and the time I'm no longer responsible for what they eat. Here are my menus and my thoughts on feeding my kids in a world that's never been more complicated for eaters.